Facebook has announced Flipboard, err…we mean Paper, a new stand alone curated news app that's meant to provide users with a much more visual experience for viewing and posting to Facebook.

Via Facebook:

Everything responds to your touch so you can pick up or thumb through stories with simple, natural movements.

You can tilt your phone to explore high-resolution panoramic photos from corner to corner, and see faces and other important details up close.

Fullscreen autoplay videos come to life and bring you deep into the action.

Beautifully detailed covers make it easy to spot articles from trusted publishers and decide what to read or watch.· Articles unfold in the app and appear fullscreen for a focused reading experience.

When you're ready to tell your own story, you know exactly what your post or photo will look like because you see a live preview before you share it. link

Paper is the first product from Facebook's Creative Labs, the team meant to push Facebook in a NYC startup kind of way into more and better standalone apps, and judging by first looks of Paper, they're off to a fine start. Paper, with its Flipboard meets Medium “everything is about visual stories” aesthetics, looks beautiful (see for yourself here) and is chock full of transitions and interesting UI elements that I can't wait to play with.

Whether Paper will replace the native Facebook app for users is an interesting question. For sure, Paper is going to slow down how you look at content on Facebook, likely by design, but its doubtful power users are going to want to slow-grind through Paper versus the Facebook app's infinite scroll. For Facebook-lite users like myself, Paper might have me checking in a bit more, and maybe, just maybe, posting a bit more too.